Westside wrote: ↑Wed Mar 13, 2024 6:30 pm
rev wrote: ↑Wed Mar 13, 2024 6:04 pm
What ABC is saying, it appears, is that infrastructure/housing needs to catch up, before we keep bringing in half a million people yearly.
Problem - not enough houses/too many people.
Therefore adding more people, when we still don't have enough houses, exacerbates the problem and other knock on effects.
Which is quite a sensible and logical opinion to have.
Except its the premise of the conclusion that is incorrect and furthering an outdated notion. The reason for the past 2 years of increased migration is because the previous 2 years had near zero migration. All we've done is processed the backlog to get back to expected increases.
I don't see anyone blaming the huge birth rate increase which has also seen a similar bounce after 2 years of a significant reduction.
Yes, more people need more houses, but blaming immigrants is just lazy and shows baked in casual racism. It's like blaming the cyclist on the road in front of your car for causing congestion and not all the other cars, including your own, which contributes more that congestion.
What we need is to ensure migration is targeted at meeting our country's needs and continuing to find solutions to the other problems, like supply chain issues and competition with interstate projects for the same resources.
Perhaps it is 'processing a backlog' due to covid border closures.
However that doesn't go to say that we should have been accepting all of those people to begin with.
Our infrastructure was over-stretched and we were in a housing shortage well before covid.
But I agree migration should be targeted to meet the needs we have. We don't have an urgent need for uber drivers and cleaners and fast food workers.
This isn't the 1960's and 1970's where Australia was scarce of people but wanting to expand it's industrial output and therefore accepting tens of thousands of migrants made sense (my grand parents being among those who migrated here).
We don't have enough tradies? The issue isn't we don't have enough people. The issue is policy. Governments are failing.
Their quick/easy fix solution is import people.
That's all well and good, it might fix that problem short term. But then the same solution is applied to other industries and sectors. And before long, the number of people on welfare has grown.
The number of people who, due to not having stable employment, turn to drugs or crime, or both, or end up homeless, grows. That compounds social issues.